In the early 1960s, when spoken-word recordings were beginning to attract a wider public, rather than just the blind or language teachers, Mary Postgate began reviewing them for a friend’s magazine. That triggered 40 years of spoken-word reviewing, starting with ten years at Audio and Record Review (later Hi-Fi News). She then reviewed for 20 years in Gramophone and also in The Times, The Financial Times and later Oxford Today. Her career in this genre paralleled a spectacular rise in the popularity of spoken-word recordings and she became a trusted name among both record producers and listeners. She distilled her favourite issues, with perceptive commentaries, into a book of recommendations for the uninitiated entitled A Few Well-Chosen Words (1995) but it was less successful than it deserved to be because reviewers and bookshops mistook it for a regular catalogue.
Muriel Mary Stewart was born in 1924, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, of English parents, who later returned to England during the Great Depression. She was educated at Cowley Girls School, St Helens, and then at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she took a degree in English. She married a microbiologist, John Postgate, in 1948 and, after a spell of school teaching, and later initiating and editing the house magazine of the National Physical Laboratory, NPL News, she gave up full-time work to concentrate on her growing family.
When her husband’s research brought him to the University of Sussex, and the family moved to Lewes, she sub-edited draft examination papers for the university’s arts departments. Her experience at the NPL had rendered her adept at detecting ambiguities and obfuscations; her discoveries discountenanced many an academic, one of whom complained angrily, “Who is this Mrs Padgett who dictates our questions?”
She sat on the governing bodies of local schools, becoming chairman of one; she was a trustee of the Southover Manor Educational Trust Ltd; she sat in Hove as a justice of the peace; and she organised the Sussex Friends of St Hilda’s. With her husband she co-wrote a biography of the social historian and gastronome, Raymond Postgate, A Stomach for Dissent (1994). Alongside this active life she pursued her reviewing which, albeit time-consuming, was as much an enjoyable hobby as a career.
She is survived by her husband and their three daughters.
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Mary Postgate, reviewer, was born on February 19, 1924. She died on January 25, 2008, aged 83